Gov. People Announces 6 Critical Tech Areas for the War Department (www.war.gov)

The Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering announced six “Critical Technology Areas” the War Department will prioritize to preserve U.S. battlefield superiority: Applied Artificial Intelligence (AAI), Biomanufacturing (BIO), Contested Logistics Technologies (LOG), Quantum and Battlefield Information Dominance (Q-BID), Scaled Directed Energy (SCADE), and Scaled Hypersonics (SHY). Officials framed these CTAs as near-term, deliverable-focused efforts to get advanced capabilities into warfighters’ hands quickly — from field-deployable AI and autonomous systems to hypersonic strike and directed-energy weapons, resilient logistics under contested conditions, biologics-enabled manufacturing, and quantum-enabled sensing, communications, and computing. For the AI/ML community this signals major research and procurement emphasis on robust, real‑time, explainable, and secure ML at the edge: low-SWaP inference, human‑machine teaming, reinforcement learning for autonomy, synthetic data and simulation for training, adversarial robustness, and post‑quantum-safe cryptography for battlefield networks. Expect increased funding, tighter industry–DoD partnerships, and demand for rigorous verification, certification and lifecycle safety of models. The push also raises governance and dual‑use concerns: accelerated innovation and commercialization opportunities come alongside heightened ethical, proliferation, and escalation risks that researchers and institutions will need to address.